


The Tales of Keris Dulmeadokht

by Aleph (Immatrael), EarthScorpion



Series: Ascensions and Transgressions [1]
Category: Exalted
Genre: F/F, Role-Playing Game, Roleplay Logs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-13 15:53:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13573851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immatrael/pseuds/Aleph, https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthScorpion/pseuds/EarthScorpion
Summary: Street rat and sorceress, pauper and princess, child of Firewander and Chosen of the Silent Wind. Who is Keris Dulmeadokht? Where did she come from? A scourge is on its way to An Teng, and the Anarchy of the Southwest may never be the same for it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is not exactly a work of fanfiction. Nor is it quite an original piece. EarthScorpion and I have been playing Kerisgame since November 2011, and over the course of six years we've averaged one session per fortnight. As RPG nerds are inclined to, we spoke about the various mishaps she'd gone through, and surprisingly, quite a lot of people said they wanted to hear more.
> 
> So around the fourth arc; that being the first with any real quality attached to the writing and gameplay, we began publishing the logs (after a certain amount of cleaning up) for interested readers to follow.
> 
> It was a definite success. People were, and still are, interested and amused by turns and eager to hear more about Keris's adventures. However, the GDocs format we've been using is getting a little cramped, and so I've chosen to host them here instead, in what I hope will be a more reader-friendly format.
> 
> And since we're jumping into Keris's story partway through, a little backstory is in order...

  
_Image courtesy of[Shyft](https://www.artstation.com/shyft) ([tumblr](http://shyft.tumblr.com/))_

Stories have many beginnings.

Most would say that this one began a few years after the Fourth Scarlet Empress vanished, leaving the Blessed Isles in chaos. This was when its protagonist was born for the second time.

The first time she was born was almost two decades earlier, in a small town in the Scavenger Lands. The town is unimportant - it was razed to the ground when she was five years old, in a slave raid conducted by the mercenary Eastern Guild of trade kings and merchant lords.

The girl took only three things from the ruin of her hometown, and held them tight as she lay in the back of a Guild slave wagon. One was her given name - Keris; clear as a bell, sharp like the curving knives of the southwest. Her looks were the second - dusky skin, sharp grey eyes, and vaguely exotic features that blended the far South with the mongrel ethnicities of the Scavenger Lands. And the last was a confused, vague jumble of memories from the life she’d seen destroyed - warm arms embracing her, a soft voice comforting her, a pair of hands holding hers; one darker than her own, one paler.

These were all she had as she entered the greatest city in Creation, carted there from a hometown whose name had vanished into traumatised fog. Here, in a slave market of Nexus, she was purchased by the adjutant of a Guild member named Makoa Kasseni. She was to be a child-slave in one of her properties, intended for housework, and for two years Keris scrubbed floors, fed chickens, cleaned ornaments and did minor chores that benefited from small hands and nimble fingers.

Then she escaped.

The next twelve years of her life were spent in Firewander District, where guards did not go. Within a month, she’d burned the slave-brand off her arm with tar gathered from a riverside spill. Not much later, a boy her own age entered the alley she'd claimed as home, and talked his way into her wary trust as she pinned him to the ground with a knife at his ear. His name, or the name he’d chosen, was Rat.

Keris’s stealthy feet and nimble fingers complemented Rat’s sharp eyes and silver tongue, and together they made something of a life for themselves. They were street rats, yes, but better off than most - had they tried, they might have been able to afford a room in some run-down tenement and found work. But pickpocketing and squatting were cheaper and easier. They were inseparable; two halves of a whole, and by fifteen they had begun to be more than just partners and friends.

Then Rat vanished, without warning, and Keris was alone again. Without his charm and skill at bartering, the money she earned with each theft shrank. Without his caution and cool head, she took greater and greater risks to stay fed and sheltered. And without even the little happiness he brought into her life, she stewed in hatred, and turned her eyes to the woman she saw as responsible for it all.

Makoa Kasseni.

Keris had a plan. She'd hatched it alone, without Rat's guidance, so it wasn't an especially well-thought-out plan. But Rat had been gone for four years, so it would have to do.

She would go to Cinnabar, the cultural district which catered to the rich and well-off, and find Makoa’s home. She would break in, putting all the skills she’d acquired in more than a decade as a pickpocket and burglar to the test. She would face the woman who’d ruined her life, and then... well, she’d work that part out when she got there, but she’d definitely have her knives to hand.

Perhaps, had she been born under another star, she would have succeeded. Maybe, if a golden shard of peerless skill had noticed her need and Chosen her, she would have achieved her ill-defined goals, and more besides. But it was not to be. Halfway through the gardens of the rich Shogunate apartment block where Makoa lived, she lost her nerve. She froze in the scant cover a stone’s throw from the immaculate walls; unable to advance but unwilling to retreat.

And so she was caught.

The guards dragged her to Sentinel’s Hill. On inspection, they found the old burn scar, and declared her an escaped slave. They beat her, chained her, and threw her into the cells for special attention. She wept - for her failure, for her pain, for what she knew was to come.

Then, a miracle occurred. A woman appeared - calm, kind, gentle, with music that she drew from the air itself and hair that moved like a living thing. Dulmea soothed Keris’s wounds and heard her story, and when she was done she offered her the power to never suffer chains again. She asked only that Keris in turn help those who had sent her - for they too were chained.

Keris accepted, and the angyalka wove a Chrysalis around them. In the annals of Fate, the girl named Keris ceased to exist that day, and the Pattern Spiders stirred uneasily at the snarl that was left of the threads in her absence.

Five days later she was born anew, hale and healthy, with Dulmea naught but a voice in her head. An Infernal Exalt; a Green Sun Princess. A Scourge; Chosen of the Silent Wind. With her newfound power she escaped the prison, she broke into Makoa's home, and she left her servants dead in her bed as an omen.

Under Dulmea's direction she performed one last burglary, greater than any petty break-in. The Tomb of Singing Blades was built for a god-king of the High First Age named Yamal Icewind, and festooned with treasures to soothe his ghost and that of his Lunar partner. There she was overtaken, briefly, by the man whose Exaltation she had inherited - Yamal himself - and fled with relics of great age and greater power.

Finally she left Nexus behind, travelling to Malfeas with the aid of a Yozi cult, to meet those who had Chosen her and in whose service she now worked.

When she arrived in Malfeas, Keris was overwhelmed by her reception. The Citizen Alveua accompanied her across the Endless Desert, and Unquestionable Jacinct himself welcomed her to the City. She was met at the gates of the Conventicle Malfeasant by the Unquestionable Lilunu; beautiful and regal and eloquent enough to render the young street rat speechless. Paraded, overwhelmed, given priceless gifts and vast properties and extensive tutelage, Keris was won over entirely by the generosity and trust of the Reclamation. In the Althing Infernal at Calibration, she was assigned to the Scavenger Lands under a more experienced Princess named Orange Blossom, and sent to destroy the ruling Ranamiin Dynasty of a city-state called Matasque.

Arriving alone and without support, Keris made friends with a trio of mortals, among them one Ilumiha Pologi, and began slowly establishing herself. She heard much about the charming, witty, handsome ambassador from the deathly nation of Thorns until she met him at the winter festival, overhearing him unseen as he spoke to a woman she had fallen out with.

His voice was as familiar to him as his face, for all that he wore a red silk scarf around his neck and tasted of death and rot now.

It was Rat.

She ran, heedless of who saw, and spent time in the countryside; embracing gifts of the Silent Wind and the Great Mother to murder Ranamiin families and poison the city-state’s crops. Eventually, too scared to face Rat alone, she fled back to Malfeas for help. The Silent Wind herself came to her as she waited for an emergency Althing to be called, and she ran with her Primordial patron for a too-brief eternity of ecstasy. Though she was wounded grievously by the flensing winds of Adorjan, she birthed a new soul from the lessons she learnt. She was also visited by the All-Hunger Blossom; Metagaos, who spoke to her through the mouth of Unquestionable Lilunu and offered to appease the many hungers she felt with his gifts - food, wealth, love, power - if she would but learn them. Orange Blossom - her supposed leader - was not there to aid her, but another experienced Princess named Nemone Sasimana agreed to help in her stead.

Returning to Matasque with Sasimana’s backing and a plan, Keris confronted Rat. Their confrontation was as emotional as it was heated, and she learnt that he had been killed, and offered power to save himself just as she had. But where her patrons were generous, his was a deathly lord from whom there was no escape. After a heartbreaking exchange of accusations and apologies, Keris killed her oldest friend to release him from the chains of pain and servitude held by the Mask of Winters. She and Sasimana quickly reestablished their position in Matasque; Sasimana’s plans and political know-how meshing well with Keris’s expertise as a thief and assassin, just as they had with Rat’s silver tongue and charm. Sasimana’s support, competence and stunning beauty led to Keris starting to develop feelings for her - feelings only slightly interrupted by the discovery that Sasimana was pregnant; a fact that the woman herself had been unaware of.

Sasimana’s open relationship with her partner - another Infernal named Testolagh - and Keris’s history with Rat were not the only relationships of note during this time. Keris learned uncomfortable truths about the relative fragility of mortals when she accidentally bewitched her friend Ogi with addictive venoms of the Great Mother, sending her into a spiral of dependent devotion to Keris that threatened to destroy her life. Keris chose to let her go as she left Matasque rather than harm her further; breaking her friend’s ties to her to set her free, and vowed to be careful around mortals in future. It was then that she internalised one of the three unspoken truths of Malfeas - that there is no love without pain.

Fresh from their triumph in Matasque, Keris asked Sasimana to help her get revenge on Makoa Kasseni. They travelled to Nexus and began to lure her into a trap. Though several severe complications arose - including a pitched battle with a First Age hungry ghost when she returned to her past life’s tomb, an attack by a Lunar Exalt and Sidereal interference in Sasimana’s plan to put a Yozi cultist indebted to her on the Council of Entities - they succeeded in abducting Kasseni, despite her attempt to poison herself. In the wake of the chaos sparked by Sasimana’s aborted plan, Nexus’s government collapsed into riots and anarchy, and she began a relationship with Keris, whose unpredictable nature and personality had captured her interest. The pair were able to justify the damage done to Creation’s greatest city, and even gained the gratitude of Unquestionable Jacinct, who had long held a grudge against the Council there.

In the aftermath, they took a long vacation to recover and grow further. Keris asked Sasimana to delve into her mind - an excruciatingly painful process - to gain information about her origins, and recovered long-lost childhood memories about the town of her birth and the faces of her parents. She birthed another soul from the heartbreak and joy of love lost and love found - this one an infant linked to the Great Mother’s gifts. She also took advantage of the opportunity to learn the secrets of Sorcery, and Sacrificed her identity as a street rat to the Station of Change. She walked away as a true Princess of the Green Sun, and took vengeance on Kasseni by Sorcerously forging her tortured mind into a bracelet from which there would be no escape.

In payment for Sasimana’s aid and the newly tempered love that had bloomed between them - not to mention the lingering resentment for Orange Blossom’s absence during her time of greatest need - Keris agreed to transfer from the Scavenger Lands to the Southwest, where Sasimana led a coven in the service of the Yozis. This brings us to the current arc, as Keris sets out for the rich and exotic nation of An Teng...


	2. Chapter 2

As she moves from the Scavenger Land coven to that of the Southwest, let us take a snapshot of Keris’s personality. On the surface, she is whimsical, playful and irreverent; a casual kleptomaniac with little respect for laws or the property of others. Her intelligence is only average, but her wits and reactions are deceptively sharp, and she has a streetwise cunning that can pass for smarts in the right light. She’s both wickedly fast at improvising and disconcertingly unpredictable when backed into a corner - or when put in vague proximity to a corner, or when exposed to unusual stimuli, or when bored. Her impulsiveness and distractibility enhance her mercurial nature, though they often work against her to an equal extent. She’s surprisingly sweet and cheerful to people she likes, and even to strangers if all other things are equal; especially if they’re pleasant back to her, or pretty, or have apples. Certainly, her force of personality is compelling, whether in person or when performing to a group, though her mastery of social minutiae and manners is lacking unless she has a formal script to follow.

Like the Demon Sea she prays to, Keris has hidden depths - depths that are uglier and more toxic than the playful waves above them. Her sweet nature hides an aching, obsessive need for affection and love - one that can never be entirely satisfied - and she can be convinced to do many things for the promise of someone who cares about her and the fear of being alone. It is no exaggeration to say that Keris views being alone and unloved with precisely as much fear as she views death itself, and it is hard to say which she would pick if forced to choose between them.

Scarcely any less influential is her nasty side. Keris grew up on the streets of Nexus - a harsh place at the best of times - and she nursed a hateful and venomous grudge against those who hurt her from the moment she was torn screaming from her father’s arms. Her hate is vicious, pitiless and utterly uncompromising; a black and white picture of the world where almost any action is justified in order to hurt those who have hurt her in the past. Slavers are a particular target of hers - less due to any objection she has towards slavery in general, and more because she blames them all for the actions that took her from her family and from her home. Keris would forego a small fortune in favour of torturing a slaver band to death. It’s possible that she already has on more than one occasion.

She hides these obsessions well, most of the time - unless one carefully watches her reactions to love and affection or exposes her to a subject of her hatred, it’s difficult to see the depth of her feelings day-to-day. The most obvious of the deeper currents that run through her personality is ironically the weakest. Keris steals, and loves pretty things, but her greed in gaining new treasures is far, far inferior to her possessiveness over those she already owns. Anyone trying to take things she considers her possessions from her is likely to earn her wrath, if not her hatred, and she is loathe to relinquish them even willingly. Part of her relentless kleptomania may well simply stem from her reluctance to part with money for goods that she can simply take for free - even if the money in question resided in another person’s belt-purse not five minutes beforehand.

Keris has a range of supernatural skills and inhuman capabilities. She need not breathe as long as she can inhale the bodies of the dead in the form of wind-ribbons. Her senses are beyond superb; her hearing sensitive enough to follow a man’s heartbeat from the other side of a stone wall, her sense of smell good enough to track scent trails through a crowded marketplace and her sense of taste so impossibly superlative that she can identify the colour of a man’s eyes from a single drop of his sweat, or detect a tasteless poison from the way it dilutes the flavour of the dish it is hidden in. Her ability to evade the senses of others is equally good, and she is a thief and spy without peer; able to rob a Guild caravan in broad daylight without anyone being the wiser.

She is also fast and agile to the point of disbelief - mortals find it all but impossible to land a blow on her even when she does nothing but dodge, and she can trivially outpace a galloping horse without fatigue or exertion. Water buoys her up and aids her; enhancing her movements instead of dragging at them, and she is more comfortable submerged than in a five-star resort. Her speed grants her perfect balance, and she is weightless as she runs along ledges, up walls, over water and even across ceilings. When she actively fights back, mortals fall like wheat before the chaff, and even most spirit-born are powerless to oppose her for long. Most do not even see her coming; the combination of her lethal spear and knives, her stealth and the poisons she can brew from Kimbery’s gifts makes for a truly terrifying assassin.

Perhaps the most obvious of her supernatural attributes is the one she inherited from her coadjutor; Dulmea, who she sees as her mother-figure. The long red hair of an angyalka graces Keris’s head, and just as she can draw music from the air like a living harpist, so her hair moves like another set of limbs. Given its length - almost twice as long as Keris herself is tall - and her habit of poisoning it with toxins of the Great Mother and braiding razor-sharp bits of Cecelynite glass and Malfean basalt into her locks, this renders it a weapon that people ignore at their peril, often fatally.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [With The Dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15824085) by [horngeek](https://archiveofourown.org/users/horngeek/pseuds/horngeek)




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